A Tale of Two Torches

So, to set the scene: our heroes have returned to a mummy-infested dungeon beneath a merman prison, intent on slaying the vampire that lies within. After a particularly tense battle with some peskily-regenerating mummies-- resulting in several infections of mummy rot-- two of the PCs, sherriff Feer and her deputy Jarmangle, decide to arm themselves with a couple of torches that they can throw at the flammable mummies.

Soon thereafter, they come to a doorway. Said doorway is blocked by a mass of foilage with little, closed-up flowers. Their usual modus operandi when faced with a suspicious-looking plant is to stand back and set it on fire. This I'm kinda counting on: the flowers, which of course unleash a poison gas when they open, are heat-sensitive, and the door through which they entered this room will not stay open. Bwahahaha, et cetera.

But my players don't set it on fire; instead, they begin investigating the plant. Feer and Jarmangle notice when they come near it that the petals start to open slightly (though not enough to unleash the poison); the others, however, don't set it off.

"Huh," said Jarmangle and Feer at about the same time. "Why does it just do it around us specifically? What do we have in common?"

The answer, of course, are the flaming torches, but they don't think of that. Instead, they each begin looking through their loot. We're both wearing hide armour, maybe it's the hide? Jarmangle takes his armour off. Nope, he still sets it off. They have swords? Jarmangle puts down his sword. Nope, still setting it off.

Repeatedly, they flip through the 3x5 cards on which are written their various possessions. Briefly, the possibility that they are both law enforcement is considered. They go through the cards again; they pass them around the table. "What is it that we have in common?"

And by this point I'm laughing hysterically.

"Maybe it's something you acquired recently," I said, trying to be helpful.

They mentally retrace their steps, but they forget about the torches.

Jarmangle finally says, "Okay, I'm taking off everything. Putting everything down. Completely nekkid."

"Everything?" I said. "Including the torch?"

"Ohhhhhhhhh."

What was so amusing to me about this was the image of these two inteprid adventurers, each holding identical torches, scratching their heads: But what do we have in common?

It's the sort of experience that could only happen at the gaming table; you'll never see the scene replayed in a fantasy novel. For me, that makes it special-- one of my favourite moments of my DMing career.

As the Kids Say, "Epic Fail".

In a recent adventure-- The Dark Spire, to be exact-- various threads and dice rolls came together to construct an "oh no" of frankly cosmic porportions.

To begin with:

• Jarmangle, the tiefling lawman, is constantly asking NPCs to tag along on adventures. The NPCs usually demure, but because this adventure reintroduced the character's sister, Tyne, it made sense for her to come along. Tyne, like Jarmangle, is a rogue by class, but a mercenary by trade. Feeling that a DMPC has no place in my campaign, I decided to let Jarmangle make the rolls and combat decisions for Tyne, and that I would handle character-stuff, resolute that she would not take the initiative or spotlight away from the group.
• Jarmangle has something of a running feud with the elfish bard, Robyn, stemming from when he accidently killed her horse with an owlbear trap, and then cooked the remains.
• Jarmangle had recently taken the tiefling racial power, Demonic Transformation.
• Jarmangle is also a bit of a pack-rat, carrying an impressive arsenal of weapons and magic items from the last ten adventures.
• Irving, the wizard, scholar, and diplomat, had possessed a battleferret in a previous adventure, and his player was eager to transform his character permanently into some kind of furry critter, so that he could use his mage hand to float himself around. Wanting to oblige, I created a fountain within the dungeon whose waters would transform a character back-and-forth.
• Said dungeon was built atop a Drow City; the drow are not only mortal enemies-as-usual with elfs and eladrin, but have a special hatred for the eladrin brewmaster (and party member) Tralamin Duskwalker.
• Because the creatures they were encountering as of late had become more dangerous, the traps more deadly, the challenges more daunting, I instituted in the previous session The Mulligan-- basically one free re-roll to be used with the group's consent.
• Because I wanted to capture more of an OD&D flavour, I told them beforehand that, at any time, if the going got too tough, they could hightail it and leave the dungeon. If they pressed on to the top of the Spire, however, there might be something worth the risk. That something, unknown to them, was One and Only One Wish.

So, here's how all the above came together:

Upon entering the Dark Spire, our heroes immediately found the fountain; both Irving and Jarmangle partook of its waters. Jarmangle seemed even more excited than Irving; he really wanted to see what would happen to his red-furred skunk body when he used that Demonic Transformation daily power.

He did not, however, want to be faffing about when Tralamin's life was on the line. So, as soon as the drow showed up, he drank from the fountain again to become a tiefling.

After the fight-- and perhaps hoping, meta-like, that the next skirmish would be less consequential-- he transformed himself into a skunk once more. Robyn offered to store Jarmangle's things in her bag of holding, but not trusting her, he gave all his gear and clothing to his sister.

The heroes came across a booby-trapped door near a strange, eldritch portal. Having not found the key, they decided to try picking the lock. Jarmangle, in skunk form, could not do it, and so he had Tyne do it.

He rolled a one. The trap shot a bolt of lightning into Tyne, sending her towards the portal.

"Make a saving throw to stop her from falling into the portal," I said.

Jarmangle's player, fearing his usual luck, demured. He handed the d20 to Robyn. "You have good luck, you do it."

She rolled a one. "Um, can I use my elven accuracy?"

"Probably not, but what the hell," I said. "Go ahead and roll again."

She rolled a one.

I grimaced.

That's when Jarmangle suggested they use The Mulligan. The group agreed. Feer volunteered to roll the dice.

She rolled a two.

Tyne fell into the pit, and the linked ring of telepathy still in skunk-mangle's possession went silent. They presumed that she was dead.

Jarmangle went back to the fountain and transformed himself into a tiefling once more. Now weaponless, armourless, and nude, he returned to the group and they pressed on to the top of the Spire, solving the various puzzles and hazards in their way.

The last of these was a cipher in nine lines. The trick was that the nine lines not only had to be translated, but then put into the proper order. Once they had done so, they read the resulting poem:

Dison wished for endless gold.
It rained down for seven hours
and crushed him dead.

Grayfield wished for endless love.
She shared his bed for seven nights
and drained him dry.

Nath thought himself a wiser man
And for seven years sought the perfect parse.
His shade seeks it still.

They soon realized that the top of the spire held someone that would grant them a wish, and that said wish would have to be phrased very carefully. Determined to bring Tyne back, they spent some time finding their own "perfect parse", eventually wishing that the portal, instead of killing her, would transport Tyne, complete and healthy, to this place and this time.

They made the wish, held their breath, and then: Tyne appeared, complete and healthy.

But only Tyne: none of her clothes or possessions came over with her, as they were not specified. Also unspecified: Jarmangle's possessions. His Sentient Sword of Blood-Drinking. His Boomerang of Stun. His Clawed Glove of Cling. His Radiant Cloak of Hearts. His Belt of Steadfasting. His Whip of Vampire-Killing. His +2 Magical Shuriken of Returningness. His Dragontooth Dagger-- so sharp, it always cuts, even on a miss. His money.

All gone, in a perfect storm.

If one of those things had been different-- if Jarmangle didn't want Tyne to come along, if he wasn't fighting with the bard and instead had stored his stuff in her bag of holding, if the skunk fountain wasn't there, if he hadn't taken Demonic Transformation a level previous-- then Tyne wouldn't have had all Jarmangle's stuff, wouldn't have tried to pick the lock because Jarmangle was a skunk, and wouldn't have been at the mercy of all those "1's".

Interesting to me, and me alone.

Fifty-one days have passed, in story, from the first adventure (played on August 15, 2010) to the thirteenth (January 30, 2011, 168 days real time).

Irving the Skunk

The human wizard Irving is now the skunk wizard Irving.

During the Merman Prison adventure, Irving's player possessed Feer's battleferret and used his mage-hand to float himself up the various towers in the now-waterless prison. Irving's player was visibly pleased; after the game, I asked him if he wanted to become a ferret full-time.

"Well, not a ferret, per se," he said. "But I wouldn't mind being something small enough to mage-hand, that was pretty cool. As long as it doesn't get in the way of any of your puzzles." He's very considerate that way, and has even fielded various rituals to make sure it didn't upset anything I had planned; always I say, don't worry about it.

And so, a couple of adventures later, I had my players come across a fountain that turned them into skunks and back again if they drank from it. Jarmangle drank from it, and as a result, lost all of his equipment and nearly killed his sister.

Irving drank and, as I expected, chose not to turn back into a human.

The logical question became, of course, what would happen to his stats? I decided that they would stay the same-- as a wizard, he had very low strength and constitution scores anyway, and there was no reason his intelligence or wisdom would have suffered-- but gave him a +2 bonus to his AC and a +1 to his reflex defense, on the assumption that, being smaller and mostly airborn, he would be harder to hit.

Some of you might be asking, why a skunk?

Well, I like skunks.

Creatures Are Not Puzzles.

My players are fairly creative, and one thing I like to do is come up with a puzzle or obstacle without providing the tools needed to overcome it. It's a special joy to see them comb through their inventory of rituals and items and improvise some way to cross a gorge without a bridge or gain access to the now-waterless towers in the merman prison.

A couple times, though, they didn't rise to the challenge the way I thought they would. I confronted them with an owlbear-- a beast that was obviously too tough for them to take on-- figuring that they'd find some way to distract it or sneak by it. But all of them seemed quite ready to just up and fight the thing, even Irving, who sometimes seems hellbent on talking his way out of physical conflict.

I had them come face-to-face with a ravenous plant with vine tentacles. They just backed up and set it on fire until it burned into ashes.

Recently, I blocked their path with a gelatinous cube. They just backed up until it got stuck in a door and started hammering it with magic missiles and arrows and the like. I had to fudge a bit-- something I don't like doing-- to get them to put on their puzzle-solving hats, and felt lousy about it afterwards.

What's become apparent to me is that while my method of puzzle construction-- here's the challenge, now think of something-- does work most of the time, it does so only when the puzzle doesn't involve a living (and thus killable, combatable) creature.

Water Pressure

In a recent adventure, my players donned primitive diving suits and braved the depths so that they might confront the villainous merman Seldak. D&D has some very simple rules for underwater combat and movement, but on the whole I didn't find those rules particularly dangerous. So, here's what my players had to contend with.

First of all, at the beginning of every turn, they had to make two checks. One was an Equipment Check, to make sure their diving suit and breathing apparatus didn't malfunction. The second was an endurance check against water pressure damage.

The DC for these checks changed depending on what "level" of water their character occupied; at the very bottom, the checks were very tough, while closer to the surface, they were easier.

If the endurance check failed, they took water pressure damage-- said damage, again, increased with the depth of water they occupied, ranging from 1d6 to 2d12. If the first equipment check failed, the endurance checks became harder. If the second failed, they took that level of pressure damage. The third equipment failure gave them no air to breathe; then they started making endurance checks against drowning, as per the standard rules.

If you fail a swim check by a certain amount in the vanilla D&D 4E rules, your character not only forfeits their movement but sinks a square. With my water pressure rules, you also instantly take that level of water pressure damage.

Players can swim freely up or down, but if they move more than one level up or down at a time, they get the bends-- double the water pressure damage followed by ongoing standard water pressure damage each turn, save ends.

This probably all sounds a little extreme, and, well, it was. It made for a much more dangerous and memorable encounter, one they got through just barely.

I wouldn't recommend these sort of rules for everyone-- it slowed the combat down a bit and could be pretty unforgiving.

House Rule: Skeletons are Zombies.

In 4E D&D, some zombie creatures-- but not all-- have a trait called "zombie weakness", in which a critical hit kills them instantly. Curious about this, I asked my friend J.D.-- a 3E and 3.5 devotee-- if those previous editions of the game had this feature. The answer was a resounding "no"-- apparently, the undead are immune to critical hits in those editions of the game.

But here's the thing; I like this rule. I get the idea of powerful, unholy undead have an unnatural resistance to a natural 20-- vampires, lichs, wights, etc. But a horde of zombies is a horde of zombies: ravenous, unthinking, slithering, fragile. The sense of terror is derived by their sheer numbers and unendingness-- which is kind of funny in a culture that's, of late, suffering zombie fatigue due to the sheer number of unending cash-ins. Anyway: for me, a critical hit killing a zombie outright makes sense. It also adds to the fun, as my players will be crossing their fingers extra hard in hopes of rolling that nat-20.

Cooler than zombies for me, though, are skeletons-- especially skeletons armed with swords and shields, ala Harryhausen. They're cooler visually, they're not quite as played out while still being familiar, and the weapons give combat encounters more complexity-- there aren't zombie archers or zombie soldiers with zombie polearms. At the same time, I really like the paradox of these fearsome undead badasses also being inherently fragile-- they're just bone, after all, and bones are prone to break and shatter. Which brings me to my house rule: animated skeletons have zombie weakness. A critical hit will kill them instantly, causing their bones to fall into a heap.

The flip-side of this rule is that "thinking" undead-- lichs, vampires, wights, et cetera-- will have an unnatural, unholy resistance to critical hits. Rolling a twenty, even if you don't hit the creature's AC, will still score an automatic hit, but the player will still have to roll damage and does not score any extra, high-crit damage.

Great Moments in 4E Combat, # 1 in a series

My players are a smart and clever bunch, but that doesn't mean they're immune to mistakes. After all, most of us are kinda new to the game, so the chances of misunderstanding or misremembering a rule is pretty high. In our most recent game, one of these little, completely understandable mistakes ballooned into something that was rather, well, epic.

So, everyone's fighting this group of orcs. But this particular section of the battle concerns six combatants: the tiefling rogue Jarmangle, the elfish bard Robyn, the human ranger Feer, two melee-heavy orcs, and one orc archer. They are arranged as follows:

Now, Jarmangle's player is always looking to score his sneak attack damage, for which he needs combat advantage. And the easiest way to get combat advantage is to flank someone. But in the heat of play, Jarmangle's player forgot that you need two people to flank someone. He moved Jarmangle to the other side of orc in question, making battle cry noises for every square:

He hits! He's about to roll sneak attack when I tell him he doesn't have combat advantage. "But I flanked him!" The game stops for a moment while we explain that, no, he didn't flank him.

The next turn goes to the orcish archer. He fires an arrow at Jarmangle, and it hits. Not only does it do damage, but it pushes Jarmangle back one square--

--so now, he's flanked by the two melee orcs. Each of which attack him on their turns, using that combat advantage to thrash him within an inch of his life.

But now Robyn and Feer are determined to come to his rescue. Robyn uses her Shout of Triumph bardic thingy, damaging enemies in a close burst-3 radius and allowing all allies in the radius to slide one square. Jarmangle slides back and to the left, and now he and Feer flank the toughest of the orcs!

Using that precious plus-2, Feer strikes a blow with her mighty two-bladed sword, the Mouth of Death! The orc dies! Unfortunately, dying orcs get to make one last attack, which targets Jarmangle. Oh, and enemies killed with the Mouth of Death explode, doing 1d6+3 damage to all creatures, save Feer, in a blast-3 radius.

Enough damage, that is, to reduce Jarmangle to zero hit points.

He, of course, "got better", but it remains I think a Great Moment in 4E Combat.

Why I Should Have NPC Names On Hand

TOM: And so, having given his warning, the Lord of the Forest Gnolls takes his leave of you...

JARMANGLE: Wait, what's his name?

TOM: Um, uh, Asimov.

* - * - *

TOM: It's a talking compass, Tralamin! It's talking about how awesome you are!

TRALAMIN: Awesome! What's your name, talking compass?

TOM: He, uh, um... Bradbury?

"So, What Do You Want To Do Next?"

A group of young adults leaving the safety and comforts of civilization to try and start a new life in a vast, unforgiving wilderness full of dangerous beasts and undiscovered wonders. That's this campaign setting in a nutshell. It should come as no surprise, then, that I'm striving to give the players a fair amount of autonomy, rather than railroading them into some Plot of Epicness.

This not only fits my preference for the picaresque in serial literature but also, in theory, makes it easier to create adventures that players can drop-in, drop-out of. (I say in theory because more often than not, I have to find some sort of excuse for so-and-so to suddenly disappear anyway.)

Of course, even a sandbox has to have some structure-- I can't just have every single possible dungeon and NPC for half of a continent within arm's reach-- so, at the end of every adventure since the fourth (I needed to give the players a chance to "settle in", since for many of them it was their first real experience with the game), I've pulled out the slowly-growing campaign map and ask them, "So, what do you want to do next?" At which point they offer, discuss, and come to some agreement on a place they want to visit (Bloodpurse Isle, which led to the discovery of Jarmangle's Secret), a quest they want to complete (free or kill the young dragon, in the Dungeon Crawl adventure), or even a general direction (as when The Bard Said South).

Drinking Contest, Drunkedness, and Hangovers.

Players and NPCs pile in cash and valuable items and then do round-after-round of shots until they either pass out or vomit. Last man (or woman) standing wins the pot.

Each character does an Endurance check, and then adds 10 to the total (dwarfs, and any others with a resistance to poison, add 15). This total represents their capacity to hold their liquor. Each round, when their character downs a shot, the player rolls 1d6 and subtracts this amount from their capacity. (This can be adjusted-- 1d4 for wine, 1d8 for the really heavy stuff, etc.)

When the capacity hits 10 or below, the character is definitely in the bag, and Dazed for the next couple of hours.

When the capacity hits zero or below, the character makes a saving throw against passing out. A successful throw results in 2d12 vomiting. This 2d12 roll really has no effect on gameplay-- it just gauges the amount of vomit, hopefully to the delight and/or disgust of the players. The character is dazed for the next couple of hours, and during this time, they are unable to use healing surges.

If the character fails the saving throw, they pass out. Another player can rouse them to wakefulness by making a DC 25 Heal check; otherwise they remain passed out for a couple hours. If a character is awakened by another, they are dazed, unable to use healing surges, and weakened for the next couple of in-game hours. If a character comes out of it after sleeping, they are merely weakened (save ends).

Magical Rod of Nerfing.

The fun part about crafting custom loot is coming up with different ways to break the balance of the game-- slightly. Sometimes, though, I don't think things through as much as I should.

Take the Merciless Longbow of Bleeding, which does double-damage when the target is bloodied. 2d10+2+the DEX modifier bonus is a lot of damage, sure, but it's not a ridiculous amount of damage.

But when the ranger uses Twin Strike with her Merciless Longbow of Bleeding, she's doing 4d10+2+DEX modifier damage. Oh, plus 1d8 Hunter's Quarry. That's potentially over 50 points of damage. For a level-three character using an at-will power, that's the very definition of ridiculous.

Moral of the story: be smarter than Tom. Not a particularly difficult task, to be sure...

The Tom Russell Method of Puzzle Design.

When I design a puzzle in a video game, I need to very carefully work out the solution and the clues that lead the player to that solution. And in some games, like Seq.Breaker, I need to come up with two or three solutions to the same room, each fitting different circumstances, without getting in the way of each other. Which is exhausting.

But I don't need to do that in D&D. I can just throw a seemingly impossible problem at the players and tell them to fix it. And then they do, often in very creative, surprising, and delightful ways. About half the puzzles I've created for my players-- and "puzzles" here encompasses also traps and obstacles like a bottomless chasm that needs crossing or an Eye of Alarm that stands poised to warn the wight inside of their approach-- are not designed with any solution in mind on my end. There's no agonizing over clues/story points, and I don't need to spend hours adjusting pixels or play-testing like I do with video game design; I just write "giant walls are going to smooch you!" on the back on my index card, and it's done. Ten seconds of prep that equals about ten minutes of gameplay/storytelling.

Now, I'm not stupid about it: very few of these sorts of challenges are designed to kill or threaten the player, and those that are deadly-- like that bottomless chasm-- won't hurt the player while they're discussing their options.

You Should Read Grognardia.

Through an entry at d20 Source, I stumbled upon Grognardia earlier today and spent several hours reading and/or skimming through over a hundred of the posts. Which took me as far back as late August-- links within posts leading to other posts notwithstanding-- which should give you some idea of the wealth of information that awaits you in those pages, which are very highly recommended.

It is, as you can probably guess from the name, very much about the old school D&D. To some, it might seem a little odd for a site devoted to a 4e campaign to be tipping its hat to a site dedicated to a very different kind of D&D that has sometimes very little in common with, and less use for, fourth edition. But to me-- well, to me, it's not odd at all: the writing is pleasurable, smart, and wide-ranging; I've found it useful from both a historical and a design perspective. What else could you want from a D&D blog?

===

One of the older posts on Grognardia is entitled Gygaxian "Naturalism", and it's keeping me up tonight. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety, but in brief,

The intention behind Gygaxian Naturalism is to paint a picture of a "real" world, which is to say, a world that exists for reasons other than purely gaming ones. The implication is that monsters have lives of their own and thus go about their business doing various things until they encounter the player characters.

It's something one sometimes loses sight of when they're creating a sneaky puzzle or setting up a cool trap, and when I came across that post, I took a look at my dungeon for Sunday and realized that its denizens didn't have any space to have those lives of their own. No place to sleep or defecate, nothing to eat-- they're just standing around one of the nine rooms waiting to fight/be saved/be tricked/what-have-you, and have apparently been standing there for a couple hundred years. This will not do, and so I'm adding two whole new wings to give my [creatures] and [creatures] some sense of verisimilitude.

The players might never visit these wings, and there's nothing in them that's going to help solve the larger puzzle of making their way to the dragon. But I want them to be there so that the players (1) can plum their depths if they so choose and (2) so that it "fits" together. Both (1) and (2) really point to the same thing-- to create "a world that exists for reasons other than purely gaming ones".

+2 of Awesomeness

Whenever a player suggests something that's incredibly awesome-- like jumping into a miles-deep pit after an owlbear rug and attempting to grab the loosely dangling frayed rope that will save him from death with his feet-- I give them a +2 awesomeness bonus on their roll.

Fun Facts.

As you can tell from a cursory glance-around of these pages, Call of the West is a home-made D&D setting, with its own quirks and lore and the like. I wanted the players to have some grounding in the setting-- while this is their first time West of the river, they would know/have heard about some of what awaits them-- without giving them a huge info-dump. That's why each of the seven players recieved a 3x5 index card, upon which was written a "Fun Fact" about the setting.

Most of the Fun Facts were incorporated into the adventure, and so when the heroes came across a Giant Turtle, the ranger Feer mentioned that they should give it a wide berth; when they came across a mound of gnoll faeces in the entrance of the mine, Filliam recognized it as a form of warning; when the dwarfs of Firepalm mentioned the "wretched cesspool of Hodam", Jarmangle told the others that he had heard of it, and that it was replete with drinking, violence, and whores, and why don't we go there sometime?

Other Fun Facts communicated something about the prejudices the East held towards the West, and particularly the gnollish tribes that wandered the plains. Another Fun Fact mentioned the Bell of Harvest, a delta at the end of the river that is rich in farmland but also the sight of violent territory wars-- setting up a Bloody Kansas sort of situation and further drawing on the setting's slight Western flavour.

I think my very first session was marred by a lot of mistakes on my part-- a climactic confrontation in which all the enemies are defeated by ranged attacks and never come near the PCs was not very thrilling-- and my own lack of confidence in what I was doing. But the Fun Facts really seemed to work and to get the players engaged in the game's world; every player had a chance to speak up and share their Fact, which helped some of them, at least momentarily, overcome their shyness/unsureness. The next time I start a campaign--regardless if it's another custom setting or one from a book-- I'm definitely going to use this approach again.

Anyone else ever try something like this?

If I had a dollar...

...for every time I got one of the D&D rules hilariously wrong, I'd have several dollars.

Getting better at it. Sorta.

d20 Poker.

The adventure I have planned for my group this coming Sunday hinges, in part, on a sort of poker game-- that would be the Old West part of my proposed genre trio High Fantasy, Old West, and Steampunk reasserting itself. The problem, of course, is that I don't actually know how to play poker, and that I'm not sure if my players do either, and, hey, we came here to play D&D anyway so what's with this poker, what's next, are we suddenly going to find ourselves playing a high-stakes game of Acquire against a bugbear so you can finally stop yammering on about you can't find anyone to play it with-- and, geez, I guess that's three or four problems, after all. So, um, problematic, that.

But I don't really want my PCs to play poker, but rather, "poker"-- that is, the art of lying to your opponent, of knowing when to bluff and when to call. That part seems to be a lot more fun than remembering what card trumps what, and that's the part that actually gives them something to roleplay. Which is kind of the point.

So, what I'm going to present them with on Sunday is what I'd call d20 poker. The characters in the game are playing some variation of a card game, but the players will just roll their d20, with the highest number winning. Once they've rolled the die, they can up the ante, match that ante or fold, bluff their opponent(s) into folding, and call it when the ante isn't being upped.

I won't know until Sunday how well it works, but it seems, from a purely mechanic standpoint, to be a fun, accessible and fast-moving way to simulate that sort of conflict in a role-playing context. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes after we've given it a try...

Tralamin's Eladrin Senses.

In our second adventure, Adrienne, playing the rather flightly male Eladrin warlock Tralamin, made a series of really bad perception and insight roles. And so it came to be that Tralamin determined that, since they all felt a great tranquility washing over them, they must be in the burial chamber of the Gnollish Queen of War, and not Peace-- and, in a keen bit of role-playing, wondered why the other chamber was filled with such hostility; that the ancient, magical door that appeared to be completely identical to the one they found in the Firepalm mine was "clearly" unrelated; that the group of Fire Dwarfs which attacked them upon exiting the Sacred Tomb of Gnollish Kings had no interest in said door.

In each case, Stephanie, playing the elven bard Robyn, also rolled the same check, came up with a better result, and then quietly shook her head to the other players, mouthing the word "no", rolling her eyes. Which seemed of apiece to her similar reactions regarding Jarmingle's less-than-impressive swashbuckling.

I talked to Adrienne a few days after the game, and asked her how she felt about that botched rolls. She really enjoyed them-- enjoyed that the character was so completely convinced that he was right, even when he was very very wrong, and enjoyed the way it fit into her Eladrin-as-Ann-Arbor-hippie characterization. Thusly encouraged, I asked her if we could make this a regular bit of shtick for her character-- every time Tralamin would need a perception or insight check, I'll assign an abnormally high difficulty class. Rolling a natural 20 would still allow him an occasional glimpse of being right, but in most cases, he would say the most ridiculous, off-base nonsense possible-- kinda like Wolverine's heightened senses, but in reverse.

This would also allow other characters-- such as Robyn-- to quietly make their own checks and to politely let the other players know that, no, those trusty Eladrin senses are wrong as usual.

Gnolls of the West.

The American Indian analogue for this campaign setting are tribes of nomadic gnolls. They're not quite the savage, bloodthirsty beasts of mainline D&D-- they're sleeker and smarter, more likely to silently stalk their prey than just charge in screaming and butchering.

Much of what the player characters know about gnollish culture is filtered through a very Eastern prism, with the same sort of condescending racial attitudes and cultural prejudices that greeted the various American Indian civilizations in the American Old West. Whether they're regarded as subhuman or as Noble Savages, there's not a whole lot of real understanding going on.

I've also drawn a bit from Herbert's Dune, in that certain behaviours that seem alien and evil to "Eastern" eyes make sense within the context of the culture and its survival needs once you've gone inside it a little. From a pure storytelling angle, it's much more enriching to say, "Well, yes, they do do 'x', but here's why, and isn't that a neat bit of world-building" than to say, "no, that's just a hideous blood libel".